Neighbors can be the most frustrating of people to deal with. A neighbor can become a close friend or a spited enemy – so hated that even plots to sabotage his stereo are thought of numerous times a day.
Maybe you’ve caught yourself looking at the drawn curtains of the house next door wondering why your neighbor appears to be sneaking into her house in broad daylight. Or maybe it is the tree next door that rains leaves down on your lawn each fall whose demise you are carefully considering. Perhaps your neighbor is a person who hurriedly walks his dog past your yard as if he is trying to escape some impending doom – only to later find a gift of dog poop on your manicured grassy knoll.
Regardless of how agreeable or how unpleasant your relationship with the next-door neighbors may be, we all have neighbors! Every person in this small world of ours must share life in one way or another with at least one other person whom we kindly refer to as a neighbor. Have you considered that our own response to our neighbors may make all the difference in our relationships with them?
I’ve traveled; and many of my friends, including the closest of friends, know a little about traveling out of experience, or dream. But what is traveling?
Travel is the change in location of people on a trip through the means of transport from one location to another. The word originates from the Middle English word ‘travailen’ (“to toil”).
Travel can be roughly stated as one simple mathematical explanation, or rule: Travel is the means of a being who changes from one state of being to another via means of transportation.
Nate Piekos (pronounced ‘PEE-kos’) is the man behind Blambot.com, a website well known in the comic book industry for fonts, lettering, and logo design. It’s not just the comic pros at Marvel and DC that use Nate’s fonts though. Everyone from The New Yorker to Kellogg’s Cereal to MTV to Hasbro to Hallmark have used Blambot fonts. Besides lettering comic books (which is an art in itself), designing fonts, and designing logos, he also keeps up a webcomic of his own called ATLAND and has written a few articles about his craft on Blambot. The cool thing about Blambot is for most commercial fonts Nate releases on the site, he releases a free font as well for independent comic creators. Nate was good enough to answer a few questions for us recently.
These are the necessities for the adventures in my life. Greeting new cultures with a smile and knowing there will be times I must choose my attitude in order to gain every ounce of opportunity from my travels. There have certainly been times of laughter, times of tears, times of listening to people’s stories, and times of observing and taking in the culture. These experiences have allowed me to learn more about the world I live in, the cultures I’m surrounded by, and the person I’m meant to be. They have also left me with countless stories, sharing the things I’ve learned about our world and about my life.
I was listening to a talk Donald Miller gave to a bunch of students at Harvard about relationships. He told a story about his friend who asked him one day if he wanted to go photograph Mt. Bachelor in Oregon one early morning. Donald reluctantly agreed and the two of them set out the next day around two in the morning to catch the sunrise.
When the two of them were about sixty miles from anywhere, his friend pulled the car over, shut it off, got out of the vehicle, started walking down the road and finally stopped about twenty-five feet up the road and laid down.
Who am I to talk about sex and romance? I’ve never had either. I almost did, once. And it took a fair amount of time for my bruised little heart to get past the confusion of the moment. Recently, the closest I’ve come to a date was with a ‘genius’ at the ‘bar’ at the Apple store. He couldn’t help me.
My track record in the love department sucks. I have felt forgotten, used, dragged along and, worst of all, like a body double. I often share too much, too fast. Then, I develop ideas of what I think a person should do with that information. But they respond either not in the way I expect, or not at all. I then turn that disappointment into complete rejection and begin to tell myself that I have no hope at ever being in love. I’ve given away little bits of me to poor expectations and replaced them with cynicism.
The sky was spitting in the freshness of the evening. A slight breeze wandered down the narrow streets and caressed the small, arched bridges of the city. The night was to be yet another of reasonable weather and fair social happenings in this sprawling urban area.
My walk through the circular streets of the central part of the city had carried me round and round, breathing in the late fall air while enjoying the sights and sounds. Yet it was that corner, that turn into a certain place I will not soon forgot.
Short and terse was the man as he asked, ‘How much?’ to the woman through the half open door. It was a simple question, thinking back to the day now, yet it stuck with me so – the sight, the sound of their voices, the quandary of the questioner.
